How does a massively popular application like Instagram work? What goes on behind the scenes? What knowledge must a team of developers have to develop a service like Instagram? Together with colleague Vassilios Stefanis, I gave a presentation in the context of the 1st Summer School in ICT at the University of Patras (CEID), directed to prospective students (high-school age).

I was extended a kind invitation to give a short talk on new technologies relating to the quality of life for neurocognitive disease patients (e.g. Alzheimer's), during the 6th Panhellenic Psychiatric Convention for Primary Healthcare. My talk focused on a short introduction to the concept of Ubiquitous Computing and presented a range of case studies in the use of UbiComp systems in

Our paper discusses the implementation and field evaluation of a context-aware mobile contact retrieval application. We examine the performance of our underlying prediction algorithm in real world conditions and report on the suitability of our hybrid interface design, as a replacement for traditional contact retrieval interfaces (e.g. phonebook and recent call list). We find that users are best served by an alphabetical ordering of prediction matches and show that hybrid interface designs can provide a modest benefit in users’ ability to find a contact, in cases of non-successful predictions. We also discuss users’ alternative strategies for retrieval in such cases.

Text entry remains key to many tasks on touchscreen smartphones and is an important factor in the usability of such devices. The known problems of text entry can be particularly acute for older adults due to physical and cognitive issues associated with ageing. In a study of mobile text entry the authors employed a variety of participatory design and formal comparative study techniques in order to explore the requirements of this group of users and to discover the key differences in texting activity between them and younger users of mobile devices. They report on the findings of a lab study of texting behaviour of older adults. The authors' findings indicate differences in attitudes to texting styles and tasks between older and younger adults. They also identify some differences in typing behaviour and reflect on methods.

I have uploaded the code for our SoNav prototype on Github, for any researchers interested in building 3D audio navigation apps for Android.

The prototype uses the concept of an "audio scent" - after a route has been calculated for the user, the route "emits" a continuous sound which the user can perceive using 3D audio delivered by their headphones. As the user walks further from the route, the level of the audio diminishes to let them know they have strayed too far.